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The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth Copyright 1992 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. Developmental Psychology 1992, \fol. 28, No. 5,759-775 The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth Inge Bretherton Department of Child and Family Studies University of Wisconsin—Madison Attachment theory is based on the joint work of John Bowlby (1907-1991) and Mary Salter Ains- worth (1913- ). Its developmental history begins in the 1930s, with Bowlby's growing interest in the link between maternal loss or deprivation and later personality development and with Ainsworth's interest in security theory. Although Bowlby's and Ainsworth's collaboration began in 1950, it entered its most creative phase much later, after Bowlby had formulated an initial blueprint of attachment theory, drawing on ethology, control systems theory, and psychoanalytic thinking, and after Ainsworth had visited Uganda, where she conducted the first empirical study of infant- mother attachment patterns. This article summarizes Bowlby's and Ainsworth's separate and joint contributions to attachment theory but also touches on other theorists and researchers whose work influenced them or was influenced by them. The article then highlights some of the major new fronts along which attachment theory is currently advancing. The article ends with some specula- tions on the future potential of the theory. Attachment theory is the joint work of John Bowlby and So long as we trace the development from its final outcome back- Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth & Bowlby, 1991). Drawing on con- wards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or even exhaus- cepts from ethology, cybernetics, information processing, devel- tive. But if we proceed in the reverse way, if we start from the opmental psychology, and psychoanalysis, John Bowlby formu- premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow these up to lated the basic tenets of the theory. He thereby revolutionized the final results, then we no longer get the impression of an inevita- our thinking about a child's tie to the mother and its disruption ble sequence of events which could not have otherwise been deter- through separation, deprivation, and bereavement. Mary Ains- mined, (p. 167) worth's innovative methodology not only made it possible to In elucidating how each idea and methodological advance test some of Bowlby's ideas empirically but also helped expand became a stepping stone for the next, my retrospective account the theory itself and is responsible for some of the new direc- of the origins of attachment theory makes the process of theory tions it is now taking. Ainsworth contributed the concept of the building seem planful and orderly. No doubt this was the case to attachment figure as a secure base from which an infant can some extent, but it may often not have seemed so to the protago- explore the world. In addition, she formulated the concept of maternal sensitivity to infant signals and its role in the develop- nists at the time. ment of infant-mother attachment patterns. The ideas now guiding attachment theory have a long devel- Origins opmental history. Although Bowlby and Ainsworth worked in- dependently of each other during their early careers, both were John Bowlby influenced by Freud and other psychoanalytic thinkers—di- rectly in Bowlby's case, indirectly in Ainsworth's. In this article, After graduating from the University of Cambridge in 1928, I document the origins of ideas that later became central to where he received rigorous scientific training and some instruc- attachment theory. I then discuss the subsequent period of tion in what is now called developmental psychology, Bowlby theory building and consolidation. Finally, I review some of the performed volunteer work at a school for maladjusted children new directions in which the theory is currently developing and while reconsidering his career goals. His experiences with two speculate on its future potential. In taking this retrospective children at the school set his professional life on course. One developmental approach to the origins of attachment theory, I was a very isolated, remote, affectionless teenager who had am reminded of Freud's (1920/1955) remark: been expelled from his previous school for theft and had had no stable mother figure. The second child was an anxious boy of 7 or 8 who trailed Bowlby around and who was known as his shadow (Ainsworth, 1974). Persuaded by this experience of the I would like to thank Mary Ainsworth and Ursula Bowlby for helpful effects of early family relationships on personality develop- input to a draft of this article. I am also grateful for insightful com- ments by three very knowledgeable anonymous reviewers. ment, Bowlby decided to embark on a career as a child psychia- Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Inge trist (Senn, 1977b). Bretherton, Department of Child and Family Studies, University of Concurrently with his studies in medicine and psychiatry, Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. Bowlby undertook training at the British Psychoanalytic Insti- 759 760 INGE BRETHERTON tute. During this period Melanie Klein was a major influence At the end of World War II, Bowlby was invited to become there (the institute had three groups: Group A sided with Freud, head of the Children's Department at the Tavistock Clinic. In Group B sided with Klein, and the Middle Group sided with line with his earlier ideas on the importance of family relation- neither). Bowlby was exposed to Kleinian (Klein, 1932) ideas ships in child therapy, he promptly renamed it the Department through his training analyst, Joan Riviere, a close associate of for Children and Parents. Indeed, in what is credited as the first Klein, and eventually through supervision by Melanie Klein published paper in family therapy, Bowlby (1949) describes herself. Although he acknowledges Riviere and Klein for how he was often able to achieve clinical breakthroughs by grounding him in the object-relations approach to psychoanaly- interviewing parents about their childhood experiences in the sis, with its emphasis on early relationships and the pathogenic presence of their troubled children. potential of loss (Bowlby, 1969, p. xvii), he had grave reserva- To Bowlby's chagrin, however, much of the clinical work in tions about aspects of the Kleinian approach to child psycho- the department was done by people with a Kleinian orientation analysis. Klein held that children's emotional problems are al- who, he says, regarded his emphasis on actual family interaction most entirely due to fantasies generated from internal conflict patterns as not particularly relevant. He therefore decided to between aggressive and libidinal drives rather than to events in found his own research unit whose efforts were focused on the external world. She hence forbade Bowlby to talk to the mother-child separation. Because separation is a clearcut and mother of a 3-year-old whom he analyzed under her supervi- undeniable event, its effects on the child and the parent-child sion (Bowlby, 1987). This was anathema to Bowlby who, in the relationship were easier to document than more subtle influ- course of his postgraduate training with two psychoanalytically ences of parental and familial interaction. trained social workers at the London Child Guidance Clinic, had come to believe that actual family experiences were a much more important, if not the basic cause of emotional distur- Mary Ainsworth bance. Mary Ainsworth (nee Salter), 6 years younger than Bowlby, Bowlby's plan to counter Klein's ideas through research is finished graduate study at the University of Toronto just before manifest in an early theoretical paper (1940) in which he pro- World War II. Courses with William Blatz had introduced her posed that, like nurserymen, psychoanalysts should study the to security theory (Blatz, 1940), which both reformulated and nature of the organism, the properties of the soil, and their challenged Freudian ideas, though Blatz chose not to recognize interaction (p. 23). He goes on to suggest that, for mothers with his debt to Freud because of the anti-Freudian climate that parenting difficulties, pervaded the University of Toronto at that time (Ainsworth, a weekly interview in which their problems are approached analyt- 1983; Blatz 1966). ically and traced back to childhood has sometimes been remark- One of the major tenets of security theory is that infants and ably effective. Having once been helped to recognize and recap- ture the feelings which she herself had as a child and to find that young children need to develop a secure dependence on parents they are accepted tolerantly and understandingly, a mother will before launching out into unfamiliar situations. In her disserta- become increasingly sympathetic and tolerant toward the same tion entitled "An Evaluation of Adjustment Based on the Con- things in her child. (Bowlby, 1940, p. 23) cept of Security," Mary Salter (1940) states it this way: These quotations reveal Bowlby's early theoretical and clinical Familial security in the early stages is of a dependent type and interest in the intergenerational transmission of attachment re- forms a basis from which the individual can work out gradually, lations and in the possibility of helping children by helping forming new skills and interests in other fields. Where familial security is lacking, the individual is handicapped by the lack of parents. Psychoanalytic object-relations theories later proposed what might be called a secure base [italics added] from which to by Fairbairn (1952) and Winnicott (1965) were congenial to work. (p. 45) Bowlby, but his thinking had developed independently of them. Bowlby's first empirical study, based on case notes from the Interestingly, Mary Salter's dissertation research included an London Child Guidance Clinic, dates from this period. Like analysis of students' autobiographical narratives in support of the boy at the school for maladjusted children, many of the the validity of her paper-and-pencil self-report scales of famil- clinic patients were affectionless and prone to stealing.
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